Word: patient
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...five visits for every American. Each visitor expects not only medical care but comfort, sympathy, relief, reassurance and solace. There was a day when he could be sure of getting all these: the day, not too far past, of the family physician who often knew as much about his patient as he did about an illness. Today, Americans get far better medical care than ever before; as for the rest, they are often lucky to get as much as a hurried smile. The result is a troubling paradox: at a time when medical skill has reached new pinnacles, the doctor...
...banished from her parents (visiting hours, 9-11 a.m.), and lucky to get a brief visit from the doctor once or twice a day. Instead of Old Doc's bedside manner, the modern physician depends on a panoply of new skills, drugs and facilities that save many a patient his predecessor would have lost. The father image has been supplanted by the skilled technician whose head is far more important than his heart. Trouble is, the patient misses the heart...
...deprivation is only partly the doctor's fault. For the very reason that medical knowledge is expanding in quantum leaps, a modern doctor must spend much more time simply keeping abreast of his profession, thus has less time for individual patients. Moreover, his new skills can best be employed not in the home, but in the office or hospital, where equipment is available. With growing affluence and insurance, more and more people can afford what he has to offer. Since the overall ratio of doctors to population has remained roughly the same-one doctor for 760 people-the result...
...result of all this change is a growing impersonality in the practice of medicine that has created a breach in the traditional doctor-patient relationship. For patients, it is difficult to relate to a doctor who is only glimpsed behind a surgical mask. For doctors, a patient seen in the office, one of perhaps 30 patients in the course of the day, does not assume the same identity as a patient seen in a home. And the excitement inherent in current medical research makes many doctors more preoccupied with the disease than with the patient. Admits Dr. Martin Cherkasky, director...
...patient's concern, his uneasiness, about doctors and doctoring is deeply ingrained. Because mankind has been so utterly and helplessly dependent on him, the doctor touches man's profoundest anxieties, eliciting both nervous humor and distrust. Said Voltaire: "Doctors pour drugs of which they know little to cure diseases of which they know less, into human beings of whom they know nothing." George Bernard Shaw gibed that doctors score only triumphs, since their mistakes are always buried. Over the ages, doctors have compounded both the awe and the anxiety by acting as a self-anointed priesthood whose rites...